Warren, Warren, Warren, Warren

If there is a Six Foot Turkey candidate this election cycle, it will be surprising no one to say it is Elizabeth Warren. Whether I, as mere private individual and cowardly citizen, will actually pull the lever for her in the primaries is another matter. I may well decide at the ultimate moment that I'd rather hide under a rock for the next year, bypass having to argue about the fraught and unanswerable "electability" question one way or the other, and  emerge blinking in November 2020 to cast my vote for whoever is still standing and is not Trump - the only really decisive factor.

But speaking in the voice of this blog, where I am supposed to stand occasionally for positive ideals rather than the mere negative avoidance of fascism (though that latter goal is surely nothing to scoff at), I want to put it down in writing that Warren is my candidate. She is far and away the most interesting person active right now in politics. Most surprising and intriguing of all, she is probably the closest thing to a "distributist" we're ever likely to see this close to the White House.

I want to expand on that point, as it is not necessarily an obvious or even a meaningful utterance. Because Warren is a "progressive" (to use a term we have weirdly appropriated from an earlier generation of American reformers who are not now otherwise, and probably should not be, entirely in favor), and because she is one of a group of politicians who are criticizing our current neoliberal capitalist order to an extent unprecedented in recent political history, she tends to be grouped together with the emerging "democratic socialist" cohort in Congress, including Bernie and AOC.

This clustering elides, however, the fact that Warren and the "democratic socialists" are actually hearkening to two quite different intellectual traditions -- one collectivist/socialist, and the other distributist/populist.

Both these traditions seek a break with the current system of neoliberal capitalism that has organized our economy for the last forty years or so. Both alike are unfamiliar to Americans reared for the last generation or two on market orthodoxies. It makes sense, therefore, that the media cannot often tell them apart.

Yet the differences between them are real nonetheless, and would be readily discernible if this country had a more uninterrupted tradition of serious critical dialogue about capitalism. These points of difference are something like the disagreements that prompted G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw to ask one another, in the headline question of a famous debate: "Do we agree?" They have shades even of the points that differentiated the Jeffersonians from the Hamiltonians, or the Marxists from the Georgists in the nineteenth century, or the progressives from the populists in the age of reform.

If you will follow me this far, I am suggesting that Warren is the Chesterton to Bernie's Shaw. She is the William Jennings Bryan to AOC's.... whoever the relevant progressive foil would be. So certain am I of this that, while an earlier fit of enthusiasm was still upon me, I was briefly in love with the idea of updated and revising Vachel Lindsay's "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan" under a new version for 2019: "Warren, Warren, Warren, Warren." I didn't get very far past the title.

Of course, I am a bit skeptical as to whether the current cohort of "democratic socialists" is actually all that socialist. Not one of them appears to be talking about -- or interested in -- the collective ownership of the means of production. And without this, you have no socialism, unless we are going to do violence to language. Instead, this generation of "socialists" is talking about a series of social programs that are not particularly radical, and which would be taken for granted in any more morally surefooted developed society than our own.

Yet, for reasons that elude me, they have chosen to use a far more explosive term to describe their program than any that would more honestly characterize it. In so doing, they have inverted the approach one would normally expect of politicians. What exactly do you call the opposite of a euphemism?

Warren rightly does not describe herself as a socialist, and while this may be a smart electoral move, it also points to an ideological difference of greater substance. If AOC and Bernie are not actually socialists proper, they are nonetheless more of that tradition than Warren.

In looking at the reality of contemporary capitalism, AOC and Bernie are - like socialists past - appalled by the material deprivation it brings -- the misery and constant insecurity. They seek to remedy this situation by meeting the basic needs going unfulfilled by capitalism, and the reforms they propose achieve this largely through greater centralism. Where there is dearth, they will rush resources through government programs. Where there is a lack of health insurance, there will be Medicare for all. Where there is student debt, there will be free higher education.

All of these proposals would be an improvement on existing realities. None of them, however, meaningfully redistribute economic power in our society. Instead, they concentrate power in a federal government.

Warren is like the socialists in many important respects. She too is concerned with ending penury as a feature of our society. She is seeking to build a country where people are not bankrupted by medical bills or unable to go to school. She therefore shares in common with the socialists many of their policy goals (as do I).

But she is bothered by something else about modern neoliberal capitalism too, beyond its apparent inability to provide for basic human needs. She is also worried about the lack of control it affords. The way in which it places people at the mercy of forces beyond their direct knowledge, and which they are not able to influence.

In her policy proposals, therefore, Warren aims at something other than centralism. Of course, nearly all her proposals require the forceful use of the federal government. But the changes they seek to effect do not merely concentrate power in that central body. Instead, they utilize the federal government to protect and strengthen smaller centers of economic power.

Her proposals to reform the private equity industry, for example, are aimed largely at shielding small and medium-sized businesses from predatory financial practices. Her recent publications on this subject are vivid and imagistic in the best Bryanite vein, comparing private equity firms at one point to "vampires." The practices she describes, however, put me in mind even more of a kind of parasitic wasp - laying eggs of debt in the host company, which proceed to devour it from within.

According to Warren, at least, and some ideologically-aligned writers, it is in large part private equity that has been responsible for picking off companies in the most struggling industries -- including local newspapers and retail chains. If both these industries have already been weakened by larger market forces -- and they have -- the demise of individual players has frequently been hastened by the arrival of the private equity firms, which offer a devil's bargain. They purchase the company using money they have borrowed from others, then transfer the debt to their host - a process that in the 1980s was known under the less euphemistic term "leveraged buyout."

Warren's proposal to unravel this industry utilizes the federal government,  but it does so in a way that would result in the preservation of mid-sized businesses (if it succeeds), and thus in a more widely-shared ownership of the means of production. This is the essence of the "distributist" model, as opposed to the socialist or collectivist one (and as opposed, of course, to our current neoliberal capitalist one).

I am using these terms in the fashion of the Chesterbelloc, but more specifically the Belloc side of the famous pair. It is unfortunate that I have to resort to such a source, to be sure. Belloc has been discredited by his affinities for Antisemitism and Italian fascism, whereas the posthumous reputation of Chesterton, despite his equally problematic writings on these subjects, has never had to face the same reckoning.

However, Belloc's 1912 classic The Servile State predates any of these troubling affiliations and is free of any evident taint of Antisemitism, in either overt or covert forms (for all that the book is a non-Marxist critique of capitalism, it is mercifully free of the usual code words that appear in literature of this sort -- "usury" and the like).

Moreover, I can see no necessary connection between the economic ideas of the early distributists and their later flirting (or worse) with the Mussolini regime. The latter had far more to do with the moral compromises and fellow-traveling common to many Catholic intellectuals at the time, who were forced to confront the fact that the papacy had aligned itself -- or at the very least made its peace with -- the Italian fascist state. (As the eminently Catholic novelist Muriel Spark quips in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, "By now she [that is, Sandy, her protagonist] had entered the Catholic Church, in whose ranks she had found quite a number of Fascists much less agreeable than Miss Brodie.")

In short, the road from the Chesterbelloc to A.R. Orage to Major Douglas to wartime propaganda for the enemy cause may have been traversed by some (Ezra Pound, most notably). But it was not the only or the logically compulsory road to take.

In any event, Belloc's main point in The Servile State still rings true, more than a hundred years later, and offers the best place to start in tracing an intellectual heritage of distributism.

Belloc was among the first to note what should be an obvious fact, but which is still strangely under-theorized in our modern society (where simply to be an anti-capitalist of any stripe is an eccentric enough stance not to warrant any specific identification).

Belloc observed that most social reformers of his day could agree on what was wrong with capitalism: it had built a regime in which only a few own the means of production (which Belloc defines to include both "land" and "capital" in their widest senses), and the vast majority own nothing, and therefore have to labor for the few in order to survive.

Having perceived this much in common, however, this does not mean the social reformers of the era agreed on what ought to be done about it. It is possible to respond to the problems in capitalism by centralizing ownership of the means of production in the state, for instance, where it will be controlled by those whom Belloc neutrally dubs "the political officers of the community," and whom - he notes - could be elected or otherwise. This would be the path of socialism.

It is also possible, however, to address the concentrated ownership of the means of production under capitalism by a quite different - and in some ways wholly opposite -- means: that is, by distributing ownership of these means more widely, among most members of society.

Having come this far, we may be tempted to ask whether this is a merely semantic distinction. Presented with the phrase: "ensuring a widespread distribution of property among the vast majority of the people," socialists may state that they share that objective -- even that it is simply a redefinition of their own central goal. Beyond a certain point, after all, what is the difference between abolishing property, and distributing property to all? What is the difference between holding property in common, and all holding property?

I believe this poses a more significant challenge to Belloc's social theory than may at first be evident. To examine whether this is true or not, however, it's helpful to look first at Belloc's version of economic history, and in particular to examine those historic eras he sees as exemplifying the ideal "distributive" society.

Belloc's book, it may not surprise you to learn, places the Catholic Church in the role of the begetter of all economic felicity in society, and the Reformation as the seed of evil. As a result, he finds he has to defend himself in his Preface from the charge that he is committing mere "special pleading" on behalf of his "coreligionists."

To convict Belloc of this charge, however, would be to fail to do justice to the fact that this is a very sly and funny book, that often makes its point in more sophisticated backdoor ways than one might expect. If special pleading it is, it is such of an arch and very British sort.

Belloc appears to be setting himself up for a home run of apologetics, for example, by noting that the Roman institution of slavery disappeared over the centuries of medieval Christian life. He then just as quickly adds, however, that the Church never - through all this period - led any kind of concerted ideological charge against the institution, nor even denounced it as sinful per se. 

Instead, he attributes the demise of the Roman system of slavery to a brute political fact: when the central administration broke down as a result of the Empire's collapse, former slaves out on the villae in the far-flung reaches of the Empire suddenly had more bargaining power. There was less of a centralized authority to enforce their subordination. Therefore, they worked out a more genuinely mutual arrangement with the local lords: set amounts of service on the lord's domain, while owning a portion of the land themselves, of which they could keep the produce, and designating a third portion of land as held in common.

This agricultural system of distributed ownership was, according to Belloc, mirrored in the social relations of the towns. The medieval guilds ensured that no proprietors in a given industry ever grew so big they were able to buy out or displace their competitors, and therefore ownership of capital in the crafts was shared fairly widely among producers as well. This created a limitation on the absolute rights of property, according to Belloc, but only in order to ensure that property as a general principle was upheld -- and was broadly shared in the society.

In describing the social and political forces that intervened to break up this relatively tolerable arrangement -- Henry VIII's seizure of the monastic lands and the parliamentary enclosures of the commons -- Belloc follows a narrative familiar from Marx and other social critics, and which was denounced by moral thinkers contemporaneous to the events (such as Thomas More).

Here again, however, just when it seems the villainy of the Protestants is an easy case to be made, Belloc pulls a counter-apologetic move. He insists that -- while Henry VIII's seizure of monastic wealth was the root of the capitalist evil -- it would have been a boon to the common people if Henry VIII had kept this horde for himself and used it to strengthen the central government at the expense of the aristocracy.

The problem was, says Belloc, that the gentry got ahold of these lands instead, and used them to increase their political clout. This they used in turn to strip the peasants of their customary rights to the use of the commons and to create a rootless and wandering proletariat (the first of many in capitalism's history).

Belloc's point, then, is that the proletariat long predated the rise of the industrial revolution. They were not created, in his account, through displacement by mechanization or by any of the necessary effects of technological innovation, but by earlier deliberate choices on the part of the ruling class to deprive them of their economic rights.

One very intriguing corollary of this is Belloc's insistence that the industrial revolution need not have led to anything like the degree of inequality and social dislocation that it actually in the end induced. If the new technologies had appeared in a society where ownership was still widely diffused among the populace, he states, rather than a society already riven between the possessing class and the dispossessed, it might have contributed to the forward economic advance and prosperity of entire communities.

After all, he notes, in such a society the capital to purchase the new instruments would have to come from innumerable small investments by the many small property-holders, rather than from the wealthy landowners who actually did finance the early industrial revolution. As a result, the success of the new ventures who have resulted in dividends paid back to a wider distribution of the public.

This is a very intriguing suggestion, which -- if it could be worked out more fully -- might help show a way out of the nightmare version of development that is still being visited on the Global South. To this day, many policymakers seem to believe deep down that the only model of development is that of displacing traditional industries though "innovation." In accordance with this theory, peasant smallholders and subsistence farmers must be put out of work through the arrival of cheap (often subsidized) agricultural products that are made by mechanized and technologically "advanced" farming methods. They can then become a wandering proletariat to staff the factories that appear in the cities.

The horrors of the 19th century industrial revolution are still unfolding, that is to say, in many parts of the world. If Belloc's alternative narrative of history can suggest that other models of development are possible, this is a worthy achievement indeed.

Belloc's account leaves out some very important considerations, however. For instance, it neglects the fact that the character of the new industrial technologies was -- much like the new "green revolution" agriculture foisted upon the world in the 20th century -- inherently labor-saving. Even if the acquisition of the new technology and its capitalization might have resulted in more widespread prosperity in a society that was itself more egalitarian to start with, therefore, there is still the problem of a decreasing demand for labor as a result of the new techniques. However careful the medieval guilds might be to shield their members from displacement by one another, it is not clear how they could hold out against a machine that made 90% of their labor obsolete.

To intervene in the market to maintain the same or broadly similar distribution of property over time therefore may require putting a check on technological innovation. Belloc's attempt to have it both ways -- the boons of industrialism with the rough egalitarianism of pre-industrial Europe -- will be unpersuasive until someone can explain more clearly why this is not the case.

Belloc also devotes insufficient attention to the fact that economic growth is made possible by large accumulations of capital. When guilds are operating so as to ensure that none of their members get so big as to be able to buy out another member, they are placing a cap on the extent that any one proprietor is able to accumulate. And in so doing, they restrict the total amount of accumulation possible for the whole society, not just for any one member.

Whether this deliberate limitation is more conducive on the whole to the social good than economic growth is perhaps an open question. What is hard to deny, however, is that growth has been a feature of capitalist economies that has had positive as well as negative effects on social life. It is downright impossible to deny that, in the brief period of time since the modern industrial economy came into being, we have attained a world in which more people are alive, and are living for longer and in better health, than in any previous phase of human history.

If we believe that human life is a value in itself -- as I do -- this is a considerable check mark in capitalism's favor. It seems to me that no honest assessment of capitalist modernity can describe it without providing some account of this double-sided character that is possesses, which includes both these astonishing humanitarian achievements as well as the hideous injustice Belloc describes.

The feature of guild life noted above -- that is, its tendency to limit the accumulation of any individual member -- likewise takes us back to that fundamental question about distributism: Is it actually different in any meaningful sense from socialism? The guild example suggests that -- applied with sufficient rigor -- it is not. If the guild polices the growth of its members to ensure that none becomes too large, this calls into question whether anyone is really "owning" anything at all. What can it mean to own something if you are not in control of disposing it? In socialism too, one is allotted one's ration of food or money from the central body - that is not the same thing as "property" as most of us would understand the term.

And who does the policing of the size of the various proprietors? The guild authorities, elected or otherwise, presumably -- who are thereby operating as a kind of government, if only on a small scale. In what sense is this different from collective ownership envisioned under socialism, which also has its small-scale "decentralized" variants?

This is just the sort of objection that Belloc would dismiss as a mere cavil, however. Early on in the book (which is really more of a pamphlet or tract in size), he spends some time examining the question of at what degree of unfreedom a person becomes truly "enslaved." He concludes at last that there is a spectrum between the conditions of freedom and slavery, rather than two absolute poles, and that this will be the case with virtually any abstract terms we seek to deploy. In no case should the existence of such a spectrum forbid us using the terms.

He might very well reply to the argument above, therefore, that while perfectly universal, guaranteed, and intentionally maintained property ownership might be indistinguishable from collective ownership, that does not make distributism conceptually indistinguishable from socialism. Most concepts are ultimately matters of degree, and we are certainly in our rights to speak of a society that still recognizes the institution of private property, but in which that property is far more widely distributed than it is at present. And -- crucially -- we can imagine one in which public policies are designed the maintain the broad contours of that distribution.

It seems to me that Elizabeth Warren's most distinctive keystone policies are designed in the hopes that they will bring us closer to such a world. They protect smaller existing centers of economic power -- mid-level businesses, e.g. -- so as to prevent the further concentration of economic power in only a few hands.

This is quite fundamentally different from what the socialists of our age are up to. They may aim to redistribute income, but their policies do not affect the distribution of the ownership of the means of production. They do not, therefore, have much to do with the distribution of real economic power in our society.

A society that implemented all of the current "democratic socialist" agenda -- public healthcare, free higher education, universal basic income, and the rest -- would be a far better and more humane society than the one we currently live in. Given the opportunity, I would vote for it. It would not, however, give people control over their own economic futures. It would feed them. It would clothe them. But it would not, in the words of Gandhi, "restore to them control over their own life and destiny."

And for some socialists, this may suffice. They may say that the most important thing for now is to focus on keeping people alive -- on making sure that people can meet their basic needs. The more nebulous matters of choosing the life one really wants to lead, of influencing one's own destiny and having a say in the decisions that impact one's economic future -- these things can wait until after there is food on the table.

Shaw, for one, would have agreed with this. It is a classic socialist position. As John Fowles once summarized Shaw's Major Barbara, the play argues the case that you have to "save people financially before you could save their souls." Or, as Engels argued in his famous speech at the graveside of Marx: "mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion."

This is, in essence, the Brechtian dictum: "grub first, morality second."

The trouble with this is two-fold, however.

First, it is self-defeating. If people forfeit all their economic power, they will soon forfeit their political power as well. And in that case, who is to say that the arrangement in which they will be fed and clothed by the government is likely to persist for any length of time?

This is the essence of the Tocquevillean insight that Elizabeth Warren seems to grasp so much better than most progressives. If power is centralized in society, and "mediating institutions" are eroded, the end result is something very likely to approach totalitarianism.

In the presence of many of our contemporary advocates of universal basic income (however sensible and admirable that specific policy idea may be in itself), my head cannot help but be filled with dystopian visions of this sort. If work is rendered obsolete by technology for nearly the whole of the population -- as many believe it will be -- only a handful of people will retain economic power in the society. What social forces and incentives do we expect will be strong enough to ensure that this tiny elite, controlling all economic power in its hands, will submit to being taxed at a high rate in order to maintain indefinitely the cost of living of all the rest of humanity? Would they expect nothing in return?

Here Belloc's specter of the "servile state" starts to shimmer before us in the gloom.

We might reply that we would compel them to honor this arrangement through the ballot box. But -- to Tocqueville's point -- how long does democracy itself survive when all economic power is concentrated, when lesser economic powers have been abolished or bled dry, and there is no mediating force to countervail or distribute the powers of compulsion and rule in a society?

And then of course there comes the question of desirability. Suppose we could by force of law somehow compel the eternal maintenance of a social contract in which the vast majority will be economically powerless, but they will be fed and clothed free of charge by the few. Is this in fact how we would want to live? Would the person compelled to survive in such a social arrangement be flourishing? We are tempted in short to ask of this individual the same questions Auden posed about his "Unknown Citizen": Was he free? Was he happy?

Which brings us to the second problem with the socialist rejection of the spiritual or moral as opposed to the material concerns about capitalism: namely, it doesn't reflect what people actually object to about this system. Which is perhaps why socialists have always -- including the ones listed above -- ended by invoking all of the moral and spiritual arguments that they supposedly disavowed.

People are not just hurt by neoliberal capitalism because it takes food out of their mouths. Offering them an alternative stream of sustenance on the dole is no replacement of what has been lost. What is lost is livelihood, purpose, and most of all a sense of personal control -- the ability to have a say in the decisions that affect one's life, the ability to influence the forces that determine one's future.

People also, of course, want food. But they want more. They want, as the labor chant goes, both bread and roses. They have a right to both. And there is no reason, other than lack of political will, why they -- we -- cannot have it.